


Moths

by jerseydevious



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Bruce Wayne is a Good Parent, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, and then asks for a horse, damian cuddles a cow, emotionchats, it's the time of year where i write ficlets for everyone as christmas presents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-12
Updated: 2019-12-12
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:55:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21764887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jerseydevious/pseuds/jerseydevious
Summary: Bruce and Damian take a walk through the snow.
Relationships: Bruce Wayne & Damian Wayne
Comments: 47
Kudos: 327





	Moths

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DawnsEternalLight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DawnsEternalLight/gifts).



> Merry Christmas to my pal @preciousthingsareprecious!!!!!!!
> 
> A Damian and Bruce being very Soft is what was required.

The stable was an ancient fixture of Wayne Manor; a cracked, winding cobblestone path wound from the back of the mansion through the overgrown fields and to what had once been an impressive stable, well-kept by an army of staff. They’d kept polo ponies, for the most part, when Bruce was a child, but also several lesson horses for Bruce to practice on, Bruce’s favorite of which was a bay gelding named Hitchcock. Hitchcock was a Morgan and a sound worker and excellent with children, the most docile of any of the horses in the barn (most of which ran fairly hot-blooded) and Bruce insisted on calling him Hopscotch. Hopscotch appreciated the frequent visits and treats. He even withstood Bruce knotting his mane and tail until a stablehand taught Bruce to braid it properly. Hopscotch, with all of the other horses, was sold off after Alfred laid off the staff, of course—Bruce had not begged for Alfred to keep him. Bruce hadn’t noticed the absence of personnel for weeks, after the third time Alfred burned breakfast and they ended up having brunch delivered, and even when he’d noticed it had been a dull, flat observation in his brain. Bruce wondered, sometimes, idly, where Hopscotch had been sold to. Wherever it was, Hopscotch was probably long dead.

He picked his way through the three feet of snow to the stable, following a trail of smaller, shallower footprints. The snow had started in for the winter the night before. It had been a miserable patrol—the cold nipped at his joints, his back, all the places metal met bone, the place in his skull where it’d cracked after Hush had cut his grappling line. Bad memories prickled at the back of his mind; several months of survivalist training in the Northernmost reaches of Alaska where he’d almost starved to death, an early instance where he was stabbed and shot and wandered through Gotham’s icy streets for an hour. Even the good memories came with their own knife to the gut, even remembering building a snowman with Jason came with its own poison. But the poison was valuable to him, and he kept it close. 

The barn was a decrepit shadow of Bruce’s memories. The large sliding doors were shut, but one hung uselessly off its metal track—the wood was rotting in places, the paint peeling. If a structure could feel like it was hunched, this one did, as if it were looming close to the ground and begging not to be noticed. It was an old structure, from an old time. 

Bruce followed the tracks in the snow to the left sliding door, where the tracks grew deep and even clicked the cobblestone beneath. Damian had struggled to open the door. It looked like he had even fallen backwards. Bruce wrenched the door open with a crackle of rust and squeezed in through the gap he made—wide enough to enter, but not wide enough to let too much snow in. 

He followed the trail of snow kicked out of the grooves of his son’s boots to the only stall that was lit. He could hear soft Arabic rising from the stall. Damian was singing, quietly, and a deeper part of Bruce wondered if it was a song Talia had sung to Damian—how often had she? Had it helped? It was hard to know, a lot of the time, what great hurt in Damian had been inflicted by Ra’s and what had been inflicted by Talia. It was impossible to know what she’d been able to protect their son from, more impossible still to think of Talia and not feel something shiver in his chest. He tried not to name the emotion, but he knew what it was; not fear, not rage, but love, love he couldn’t talk himself out of, love he couldn’t let go of. 

The stall door was pulled shut. Bruce pushed it open, and Damian’s song stuttered to a stop. The look he gave Bruce was sheepish, but when he spoke, his voice was strong and pompous: “Father.”

Damian was propped leaning against Batcow, and her head was twisted so it was in Damian’s lap. Damian was stroking her muzzle with one hand, another roving around her ears. A scar on his left knuckle winked in the yellow light. The two of them were situated on Batcow’s mattress, which was an addition Damian had insisted upon for the long winters where Gotham’s inclement weather meant they kept her inside—he hadn’t asked Bruce, just dragged a mattress down to the stable himself from a guest bedroom. Bruce hadn’t known about until Dick had mentioned it. He made it a habit to avoid the stable. 

Bruce grunted. He stepped in, his shoes—Oxfords, which he was likely going to have to throw out, after this—and settled on a clean patch of sawdust. “You wanted me to look at ventilation.”

“Yes,” Damian said, crisply. “I think the ventilation system is faulty. I have noticed it in my time here. At night, the heater is not functioning to full capacity, and drastic shifts in temperature can cause stress.”

Bruce scrubbed at his eyes with a hand. “Alright. I’ll look at it.”

“Tt. She is fine, for now.”

Bruce noticed the shaking of Damian’s fingers. He shrugged off his own overcoat and passed it to Damian. Even inside the barn, the cold crawled up his skin. He suppressed a shudder. Alaska had been colder.

Damian took it and wrapped it around his shoulders. Batcow made a deep gurgling noise of distaste at her displacement, and when Damian was resettled, he cooed to her in Arabic. 

“Did your mother sing to you?” Bruce asked. There was a part of him that was horrified to have asked the question, but his natural curiosity had led him to pry about darker subjects than lullabies. 

“Not often,” Damian said. “It was a childish practice. It belittled me.”

Bruce stared at his hands. He should have known that Damian existed, that Talia never acted without reason—one of the reasons he had loved her, that careful, judicious behavior. No motion, no word, no breath wasted. Someone with infinite time who was still a scrupulous manager of it. He should have known, and he would have known, if he had ever wanted to look. If he hadn’t immediately taken his memory of her and locked it away so he’d never think about it. Through his inaction he’d left Damian to fend for himself. Through his inaction Damian had suffered immensely, would continue to suffer from the memories of his childhood as he navigated the rest of his life. There was no memory that came without its poison; and every memory he had with Damian would be chased by,  _ you would have more of these if you had simply thought. Isn’t that what you do? Don’t you call yourself a detective? Don’t you call yourself a father? _

“Yes,” Bruce said, eventually, because he had nothing intelligent to say.

“Grayson said he was coming by, tomorrow. He could help.”   
  


Bruce nodded, and rose to his feet. One of his knees popped. The ache in them turned in a brief, burning grip, and then subsided when Bruce straightened. “Yes, well,” Bruce said. “That’ll be fine. If you want to patrol tonight, you need to head inside and warm up before we go. It’ll be dark, soon.”

Damian dipped down and pressed a kiss to the space between Batcow’s eyes, patting her nose. He said something gentle in Arabic and weaseled out of her hold. 

Damian followed him silently out of the stable. Bruce pulled the door shut behind them, and then marched forward through the snow. Already, the sky was opening up, thick flurries whirling down. The young trees that had taken root in the fields—fields that had once been pristine grass, short-cropped, kempt—were bare of their leaves. They jutted out across the white like the feet of crows, jagged talons scraping the sky. 

“Where were you, today, Father,” Damian asked, and his voice came from some distance behind him. Bruce slowed his pace. He hadn’t realized he was walking quickly.

“Gathering information,” Bruce said. The words rumbled low in his throat. 

“On what.”

Bruce stopped to allow Damian to catch up. He didn’t look at Damian; that would have made his boy’s cheeks flush red with indignation, that simple acknowledgement would have left Damian in a foul mood for the rest of the night. He just listened for the approaching crunch of boots on snow, and then started off again when they were close enough. 

“George Edwards,” Bruce said. “Recently his name has been coming up at events, from the mouths of people I have been trying to have arrested for years, now. I decided to do a little investigating.”

“The verdict?”

He thought of the low pitch of Edwards’s voice as he leaned it,  _ you like ‘em young, don’t you. That’s what they say about you. I’ve got young.  _ Bruce had asked,  _ how do you feel about heights. _ Edwards’s curious stare _ —why? _ And Bruce had said,  _ I’d like to take you on my private jet sometime, to celebrate this new friendship of ours, _ and the words had burned his throat like acid.  _ Don’t like ‘em much, but I’d kill to see that jet, _ had been Edwards’s response.

“He is a monster,” Bruce said, finally. “And tonight I will break both of his hands and dangle him from a rooftop until he cries for mercy. And then I’m going to leave him there while I turn a drive I stole from his office to Gordon, and tell him to take his time.”

Damian grinned wickedly. “Exciting, Father.”

“You will not be watching,” Bruce snapped.

“I did not assume I would be,” Damian responded, his tone souring. “You refuse to recognize my maturity.”

Bruce stopped. His chest ached along decades’ worth of healed fractures—the bone felt like cloth crawling with moths, all of them fluttering with soft wings, wandering on thin legs that tickled his nerves. It hurt, along his sternum, along his collarbone, like something blunt and made of steel had been driven brutally into his chest.  _ Maturity, _ Damian said,  _ maturity, _ Damian spat, he still thought it was a question of maturity. 

Bruce turned and knelt in the snow. “I know you have seen worse,” Bruce said. His eyes never left Damian’s, tracked them as they flickered across Bruce’s face, startled by his sudden turn. The snow soaked the knee of Bruce’s pants. His bones ground together. The cold was unkind. 

“I know you have seen worse,” Bruce repeated. “But that does not mean you need to—to continue to see it. It is not your world. What you have gone through, that violence—it doesn’t have to dominate you.”

Damian’s brows furrowed. “You aren’t nonviolent, Father.”

Bruce swallowed a breath of air, took it in like needles in his throat. “I’m not. But I don’t kill. I draw my line. I made a choice to use violence to stop violence that I had witnessed. You can make a different choice, you can make any choice you like. But I don’t exclude you because I question your maturity. It is because I think you have seen… some of the very worst. And you shouldn’t have to. Not anymore.”

Damian looked away. His jaw was clenched. “I can take it,” he snarled. 

“That’s not the question. The question is if you should. And as long as you are here, under my protection, you should not. You will not take it. That is _ my  _ job.”

It was precisely the wrong thing to say. 

“You don’t want me to be Batman,” Damian said, sharply. 

Bruce tried to recognize his misstep. “You are jumping to conclusions,” he said. 

Damian jerked away and jabbed a finger at Bruce’s chest. “I knew it, I knew it—you don’t want me to take your place, Father, _ you—” _

Bruce wrapped a hand around Damian’s fist. “Quiet,” he said. 

Damian stilled. His body was tense with furious energy. “Yes,” he said. 

“You are still Robin,” Bruce rumbled. “Being Robin isn’t the Batman internship program. It’s just being Robin. If you want to be Batman, we’ll talk when you’re older. But right now you are Robin. You are my partner. And being Robin is about doing the things that I cannot.”

Damian’s brow raised. “You sound like Grayson.”

Bruce snorted. “No. He sounds like me. He gave you that speech?”

Damian lowered his hand. Bruce didn’t let it go—he thumbed over Damian’s calloused knuckles, as soft as he could. “Plenty,” he said. 

“Why would it be a different situation with me?”

“I am  _ your _ heir,” Damian said. 

“You are my son, and my Robin, before you are that,” Bruce said.

Damian sneered. “And I do what you can’t.”

Damian’s hand was shaking in his. Bruce rose. His knee was beginning to go numb, and his rise was stiff. “Precisely.”

They started off for the Manor, again, and Bruce was pushing open one of the doors that connected to a servant’s hallway when Damian said, “What is it.”

Bruce stilled, hand flat against the wood. He had never let go of Damian’s hand, instead keeping it warm in his while he led Damian home, and Damian’s fingers in his had gone rigid. 

“What is what,” Bruce said. 

“What is it. What you cannot do.”

Bruce stared at his hand braced on the door, the scars and dark spots and pockmarks that riddled it. The crooked fingers. The odd way the tip of his pinky curled, from where it had been cut off and reattached. How he knew, even at Damian’s age, that Damian’s hand looked similar. “It’s not any one thing,” Bruce said, sliding inside the hall. 

“Tt.”

Bruce crouched down and wrapped his arms around Damian’s middle and hauled him up. “Be happier than I am,” he said. “Be as happy as you can be.”

Damian’s arms wrapped around his neck. For the longest time, Bruce avoided physical contact, with his son. He allowed Damian his space. Painful, it had been, the urge to touch and communicate  _ I love you, you are dear to me, I will never let you go _ into a hair ruffle or a squeezed shoulder, the easiest way he had, and the inability to carry it through. It had been Dick who had set him straight _ —you act like he’s radioactive, Bruce. A hug would go a long way. _

That feeling in his chest—the moths, turning his bones to dust—was colder than the snow outside. Guilt, after years of it, no longer felt like a weight. A weight was too simple, for the ever-changing web of guilt he carried. Instead it was a kind of emptiness, a desolation, holes in cloth left by moths.

Damian’s weight was warm against him. “As happy as I can be,” Damian said. 

There was the sound of Bruce’s wet shoes squeaking against the hardwood, the feeling of Damian’s cheek leaning into Bruce’s hair, and then Damian said, “I would be happier with a horse, I think.”

“Little shit.”

Damian took one of the hands wrapped around Bruce’s neck and raised it to flick Bruce in the chin. “Pennyworth would crucify you for such foul language.”

Bruce chuckled. “You know, when I was your age, Alfred called me ‘little shit’ more than he called me by my actual name.”

“Liar.”

“Not in the least. You can ask him.”

“Tt,” Damian sniffed. 

Bruce nudged open a swinging door that led to the wide ballroom with his knee, and dropped Damian to the ground. He’d like to believe that Damian’s slide from his side was somewhat reluctant. It was a difficult thing to believe, but he’d like to. 

“I want a horse,” Damian said, seriously. 

Bruce patted his head. “We can discuss it. Later.”

Damian looped a finger around Bruce’s wrist. “Make a plan of it, Father,” he said, haughtily, and then his voice dropped into something quiet. “Would you like to know what else Grayson told me, about Robin.”

Bruce nodded. 

Damian studied Bruce’s hand, and then flipped it over and pressed a kiss to the palm. “We—Robins—make you… happier. If I am to be the happiest I can be, the same should be true of you.”

Bruce looked down at him and his heart thrummed. There was something in his throat, dense and hot. “Emotions,” he said, “are transitory. When I say I want you to be happy—this is not that you will never experience suffering again. But I think, if you are happy, that suffering will give you empathy, and doing good—that will make you happy. I want you to be as happy as you can be as often as you can be.” 

_ I don’t want you to be Batman, _ Bruce thought. 

Damian pressed another kiss to Bruce’s palm, and said, “Together. We are partners.” He paused. “And do not forget about the horse.”

  
Then he was gone, trotting down the hall. Bruce stood there and felt the moths ravage what was left of his chest, carving a hole into it, felt like blood was leaking onto his front,  _ I don’t want you to be Batman _ ringing around his head.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm a little mad that this fic is literally just: Damian snuggles a cow, Bruce and Damian walk, Bruce and Damian go inside. It's. How did I become that writer.


End file.
